ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the role that ‘original meaning’—that is, the meaning that a text would have had for its author or original audience—plays in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics. The first half of the chapter discusses his celebrated image of the ‘fusion of horizons.’ Gadamer’s readers frequently take this image to suggest a sort of mild originalism on Gadamer’s part, one according to which successful understanding requires merging a text’s original meaning with its meaning-for-us. The chapter argues that this is a misinterpretation. Fusing horizons is not a matter of recovering, even partially, an original meaning, but about coming to recognize the subject matter of which a text speaks. Thus, the fusion of horizons is not in tension with the anti-originalist thrust of Gadamer’s wider thought. The second half of the chapter argues that this anti-originalism is nevertheless compatible with the idea that understanding a text typically requires knowing a fair bit about the historical situation in which it was written. Such knowledge is needed, it is argued, not to recover an original meaning, but in order to know the language in the way required to experience its meaning for one’s own situation.
